


Cycles Be Damned

by Aadizookewinini



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Anxiety Attacks, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Is a Good Bro, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Canon Compliant, Captain America: The First Avenger, Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Fluff and Angst, Gender Dysphoria, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Transphobia, M/M, Men Crying, Menstruation, Missing Scene, Panic Attacks, Period Typical Attitudes, Period Typical Language, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Trans Steve Rogers, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 15:25:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19406077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aadizookewinini/pseuds/Aadizookewinini
Summary: Missing scenes and conversations set between the Austrian rescue and the bar scene.FTM Steve Rogers hasn't had a cycle since the serum and gets surprised by one in the night. He panics and Bucky thankfully finds him before anyone else does. Between helping Steve get cleaned up and hide the evidence that Captain America is transgender, the boys have some over due and important conversations about how the serum changed Steve and what happened to Bucky in Zola's lab that they haven't had a chance to have yet since the rescue.





	Cycles Be Damned

**Author's Note:**

> This story started out as a FTM Steve Rogers fic where he gets surprised by a cycle after months and months of none after the serum procedure but quickly took on a life of it's own and became more then that when the boys decided they needed to have some overdue conversations. Turned into a much longer hurt/comfort and fluff/angst piece then I had intended. But I'm pretty happy with it as my first AO3 and Marvel effort and first fic I've written and shared with anyone in years to get writing again and get the creative juices flowing again. With that in mind, be gentle with me! 
> 
> As another side note, the author is FTM himself so was writing with language in reference to cycles that I personally don't find triggering/offensive while still addressing the topic but if any other trans readers do find the language triggering or an issue, I'm happy to work with you in changing it accordingly while still maintaining the essence of the story. Also did some Googling for a rough idea of when synthetic testosterone was developed and discovered that it's been around since 1935 (so before the War) and I'm purposefully being pretty vague with how Steve got access to hormones during the War and the Depression. He's stubborn and determined enough he would have found a way if he knew it was an option and it's not entirely critical to the story beyond the fact that he did have it in his system at the time of serum procedure, and, given it was such an early incarnation of testosterone, that it probably wouldn't have been nearly as effective at suppressing cycles like modern day HRT is and even then you can still get surprised.

_‘Shit!’_ The curse hung in the early morning air of the tent like a mantra, hissed but vehement. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’ 

The super soldier serum had been so effective at altering his body and physiology on every level that Steve sometimes _forgot_ , even if just for a few seconds, a few brief hours, that he wasn’t biology born male. His soul may be so, but his body was not. And as wonderful as Erskine’s serum was, it could only do so much. It couldn’t make him grow parts that had never been there to begin with; it could only enhance what was already there, what was already going through his system. A special pain all of it’s own to know that no matter how fast or strong or how many people he’d helped or how many Hydra he put down that he would always be different. 

To have such a stark reminder of that truth felt like a punch to the solar plexus. Left him feeling breathless. Incapacitated. The longer he stared at the soiled fabric, the blood darkened to maroon as it had aged and dried during the night, Steve wanted to cry. Tears of despair stung his eyes as the salty, coppery scent of blood – old blood – permeated the tent, so subtle that only someone with enhanced senses such as himself could immediately pick up on it. 

‘Shit!’ He cursed again. ‘Godammit!’ 

When he had first been given the serum, bathed in the screaming heat of the vita rays, he cycles had stopped. Erskine had explained this could happen as the serum components interacted with the synthetic testosterone already in his system. But he hadn’t been able to guarantee one way or the other as not only was hormone replacement therapy concept new in the medical arena, but the super soldier serum had never been tested before. They had been entirely off the edge of the map. But miraculously, it had stopped the cycles, and in the months that Steve had been touring the country and Europe doing the bond shows, he hadn’t had to deal with a single cycle. He’d more than half convinced himself he’d never had to again with a silent, internal thrill every day underclothes had stayed unsoiled from menstrual blood. 

A false sense of security, as it had turned out. 

Panic strong armed Steve’s normally strategic thinking he’d been increasingly well known for since his rescue of the 107th in Austria. Instead of solutions, practiced things that could be done right then and now, like a true military man, fear was whipping itself up into an increasingly suffocating storm inside him until he felt paralyzed in place with underclothes still around his knees; he felt twelve years old again, getting his very first cycle, not knowing what to do or what it meant, just knowing it was _wrong_ , fear paralyzing him until his mother had found him hyperventilating in the bathroom. Explained what a cycle was and what it meant and breaking her son’s heart as she did. But even the prospect of someone bursting into his tent at any moment to inform him of the morning debrief and revealing Captain America’s great secret to the world wasn’t enough to break through the spell. 

It was like an asthma attack of old the way Steve could feel his chest tightening, breaths shortening, vision constricting to the dried blood. Images of being dragged naked through the camp, bloodied clothes being waved like a shameful flag, men jeering and spitting at his deceit, being shot or beaten – or worse, being left behind alone and defenseless in enemy territory – flash through his mind. But he couldn’t get himself to move. 

Steve didn’t know how long he was in that state before his worst fears were manifested – his roiling thoughts summoning judge, jury, and executioner - when his tent flap was roughly flicked open as someone entered. But rather than it being Dum Dum or Gabe, it was Bucky. 

‘Steve?’ The other man pulled up abruptly, flap falling shut behind him, casting the surroundings back into a sepia semi darkness, at the sight before him. _‘What the hell?!’_

It was the familiar voice, the presence of another person, the fight or flight or freeze circuits finally being circumvented, that roused Steve back to a more grounded state. 

‘It came back,’ His voice wavered pitifully, heavy with tears, as his head whipped up to meet Bucky’s incredulous gaze. ‘Buck, it came back.’ 

It wasn’t until Bucky looked again at the bloodied underclothes with a fresh context did the penny drop and understanding flood across his face. 

‘Shit.’ His curse echoed Steve’s from minuets earlier. ‘Oh Steve.’

‘It’d been months, Buck.’ The panic seeped into his words now, tumbling and jousting to get out now that his mouth seemed to be working again. ‘It was gone. _Gone._ What am I gonna do?!’ Steve’s hands shook as he hastily pulled up his clothes back up before dropping his voice even lower. ‘What if the others find out?’ 

Bucky couldn’t watch Steve fall apart like this without at least _trying_ to sooth the other man. The sun that so much of his world had orbited since they were kids that hadn’t known what love really was. He stepped forward to catch the blonde’s shoulders, internally wincing at how violently Steve shook was anxiety, still not used to how _big_ he was now, his own hands sliding up to disentangle the other man’s hands from the harried locks they had buried themselves in, squeezing the trembling digits to get his attention. 

‘Steve, I need you to calm down, alright?’ He lowered the pitch of his voice, not only for privacy purposes, but also mirroring past occasions he’d talked Steve down from an anxiety attack or when one of his sisters were upset. ‘It’s gonna be alright. We hid this for years, remember? We can do it again.’ 

And it was true: they had effectively hid Steve’s cycles for years before and during the early years of the war. The only other souls that knew about Steve’s situation aside from Erskine has been Sarah Rogers – for obvious reasons – and Bucky’s sister Rebecca when they’d been caught filching menstrual pads from her supply when the boys had been caught by surprise, not unlike today, during a sleepover at the Barnes’. She had been sworn to secrecy and thus far had been good to her word as Steve and Bucky’s friendship, and eventual relationship, had continued to evolve. But having a sympathetic mother and sister didn’t make the reality of Steve’s predicament any easier. Or _safer_. The 30s and 40s were a bad time to be queer – let alone someone even more of an outlier of society – when gays and lesbians were regularly bashed and harassed or arrested for simply being the way that they were. 

Steve and Bucky had had more than enough narrow escapes before the elder had been drafted and the pair separated for the first time in more than a decade. Every escape had been one too many for Bucky when that same bolt of pure animal terror would ignite in his chest like a 4th of July firework at what could have happened to Steve if the cops or the hate filled, boozed up thugs of Brooklyn had realized his friend – his _partner_ – was more than what initially met the eye. And that with the near none-existent privacy of the army where squads of men lived in close quarters for months and years on end who saw and heard damn near _everything_ not unlike a dysfunctional, smoking, cussing family of brothers. One thing was absolutely certain: Steve was right in that _**no one**_ could know about this. 

‘Steve, breath,’ Bucky coached, guiding the other man to sit down on the cot as he was still well and truly under the throes of panic. ‘I need you to breath for me. Nice and slow like we used to for your lungs.’ A jerky nod in response answered the request before the shoulders under the sniper’s hands rose in an attempt at a deliberately slow, deep breath. ‘You remember that I grew up and lived with three sisters and a mother, yeah? I lived with _you_ and we were together before you started getting the testosterone. And if you live with dames – or people who have some of the same parts – ,’ He gestured apologetically at Steve, ‘than you’re gonna deal with this at some point.’ Bucky crouched down even further to try catch Steve’s eye. ‘This is not my first dance with this, is all I’m saying.’ 

Blue eyes tracked his mouth as he whispered, so Bucky knew that Steve was listening. And his breathing felt better as well. Not totally normal, but _better_ at least compared to the hare-pace gasps from earlier. And that made _him_ feel better because Steve panicking made him want to panic and someone needed to be the grounding presence in this relationship. And while he’d been talking, getting control of the situation and buying himself some time to think, the sniper’s brain had been whirling in the background for solutions.

‘Stevie, you still with me?’ Bucky prompted gently, giving Steve a minuet shake to get his attention. 

‘Yeah…’

‘Okay, this is what we’re gonna do,’ Bucky shifted his hands until he had scooped up the other man’s ankles, still in standard issue leather boots from the bite of the German winter nights, and in a deft movement, swung the super soldier’s legs back onto the cot. ‘You’re gonna get back into that cot and get covered up and pretend to sleep while I slip off to the med tent and smuggle some bandages and whatever else won’t be missed. And we’ll get you cleaned up and changed and scrub these clothes out later tonight at the creek where no one will see.’ 

‘Thank you,’ Steve whispered, hand moving to catch Bucky’s wrist as he drew the army issue wool blanket back up over the blonde’s clothed body. His eyes looked up Bucky with such raw vulnerability, such open love, truly present for the first time since Bucky had come into the tent, that the other man couldn’t help but to pause, his own chest equally expanding and constricting from how much he loved this man. ‘Thank you for helping me.’ 

‘You don’t have to thank me, you punk,’ Bucky’s voice softened even further in affection as he reached out to gently brush the still sleep warm locks off Steve’s forehead. It didn’t matter that neither of them had had a proper bath in days; it didn’t matter that the dusty gold locks were in desperate need of a wash; it didn’t matter because this was Steve. _His_ Steve. ‘You know I’ll always be there watching your back.’ 

To further drive home his words, Bucky leaned in to brush a kiss on the crown of the other man’s head. He knew his lips were chapped and cracked from the cold and dehydration, but he didn’t care. He simply didn’t care. All that mattered to him was that he and Steve were together again when Bucky had convinced himself he would never see this face again, kiss this face again, touch these hands again. Every moment, every sensation, was a moment and a victory snatched from the jaws of Death; and Bucky swore to himself on the walk back to the camp after Austria that he would treasure every one of them. 

‘No, seriously, Buck,’ Steve stopped the sniper when he went in to kiss his mouth, ‘ _thank you._ I’d have been stuffed if it was anyone else but you that had come into this tent.’ It was then that he closed the distance between them and met Bucky’s lips for a briefly chaste but utterly heartfelt meeting of lips. ‘I love you so fucking much.’

‘I love you too,’ Bucky made a point of meeting Steve’s eyes as he answered, needing him to know how much he meant it with every fibre and how inadequately those four words captured such raw depth of feeling. ‘And if we’re doing thank yous, then thank you for saving me back in Austria because _I_ would been stuffed if you hadn’t shown up.’ 

There was a moment of silence as Bucky stood up and started to move away from the cot.

‘They abandoned you.’

A terrible swooping happened in Bucky’s stomach at the declaration. 

‘What?’

‘Phillips, the government.’ Steve’s voice shook with tears again as the words carried over in the pre-dawn quiet. ‘They abandoned you and the rest of the 107th. No one was coming – except for me.’ Steve sniffed and wiped away a stray tear that had run across the bridge of his nose from the angle he was lying. ‘The thought of you dead, or not knowing one way or another, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave well enough alone; couldn’t keep being the monkey they wanted me to be when they would just leave their own men to die – leave _you_ to die – not giving a shit if it was right or wrong.’ 

If Bucky’s heart could have expanded any further with love, with _respect_ , for the man that had been the kid that fought bullies with a trash can lid and the heart of a lion, it would have at those words. The hurt and rage at his own people leaving him for dead, for a Hydra guinea pig, was eclipsed by that love. Knowing that Steve had run headfirst into a circle of Hell without a thought for him was the greatest admission of his value and worth that anyone had ever given Bucky. Everyone – every queer hating mongrel, every army general pig, every person that would dare hate Steve or want to hurt him just for being the way he was – every one of them could go fuck themselves as far as Bucky was concerned. This man was too goddamn good for this world, cycles be damned. 

‘Than it’s you and _only_ you that I owe my life and I’ll answer to.’ 

The two men swapped a final teary smile before Bucky ducked back out of the tent to get the supplies they needed before the camp could wake up anymore then it already had and their conversation had taken an altogether different turn. 

The waxing moon reflected off the surface of the water as the two men squatted next to the creek later that night. It made a cold fist curl around his insides that had nothing to do with the freezing water his hands and forearms were submerged in under the blanket of ice and snow that Steve had punched holes in for them to work when the reflected light made his mind immediately jump to the flames glinting on the metal in the Austrian warehouse as it had burned around him and Bucky. 

Steve couldn’t believe it’d only been less then two days ago that he’d found the sniper strapped down to that table in Zola’s lab. Everything seemed to have moved so fast with escaping and encountering Schmidt and he still was reeling from both the rewards and consequences of by far the rashest act Steve had done to date. But despite the trauma of the image of Bucky screaming _‘No! Not without you!’_ across the looming chasm between the railings still stood out as one of his most vivid memories of the entire experience. The fire reflecting in the other man’s panic wide eyes. How tightly his hands had gripped the searing hot railing when he had barely been able to walk after Steve had gotten him off the table. The absolute conviction that they would leave together or not at all. The love and horror of that moment still stole Steve’s breath as he renewed his furious scrubbing, the harsh lye soap they had smuggled for the task smarting his skin, as if it could scrub away the memories as well as the bloodstains. 

‘Did you mean it?’ Steve couldn’t help himself as his traitorous mouth unbiddenly voiced the thought that had been ricocheting around his head. 

‘What?’

Bucky paused with Steve’s trousers in his dripping hands. 

‘What you said in Austria.’ Their eyes met as they stared through fringes that had fallen across brows in their work hunched over the creek. ‘That you wouldn’t leave without me.’ 

As soon as the penny dropped in recognition at what the super-soldier was talking about, Bucky’s gaze hardened with conviction. 

_‘Yes.’_

The shadows pooled in the hollows of sniper’s face with his back to the moon. Highlighted how much weight he’d lost in captivity. How sharp his jaw line was compared to when Steve has last seen him. How cheekbones crested over cheeks gaunt from starvation and illness. All these little details of suffering accumulating to make Bucky’s stare that much more intense. And as much as Steve had already known the answer, he needed to hear it again for himself when they weren’t in the adrenaline, panic fueled heat of the moment. Even so, the declaration ungrounded him with a surge of emotions. Shock. Fear. Love. He didn’t know what to do with all the emotions that his partner’s answer roused. It shook him down to his very core that someone cared for him so deeply when he had always been too small, too sickly, too everything before the serum to be worth the trouble of a second thought, let alone laying down next to him on the wire. To know that his life had that much value to even one other person that they would refuse to go on if his piece wasn’t a part of their puzzle. 

It scared him. That intensity of love scared him. Steve had always read and heard others wax whimsically on about that kind of love but he’d never truly understood. Understood how someone could love a other that much. But now he did because he’d seen it with his own eyes and had felt it himself when he had gone rogue on an unsanctioned mission to save Bucky, fuck the consequences and anyone that got in his way. And it scared him because now not only did he understand that depth of love but he also understood how dangerous that kind of love was. That it was a vicious motivator that would make someone watch the world burn if it meant they could save that one person they loved above all else. 

‘That jump you did between the railings,’ Bucky’s voice brought him back to the present as the sniper re-lathered the trousers. ‘No ordinary man could have made that jump.’ He hesitated before asking the real question he wanted to ask. ‘What did they do to you, Steve?’

‘It was a serum,’ Steve held up his saturated underclothes up the moonlight to check if he’d managed to get all the blood out of the cotton. ‘This scientist Erskine made it for this military project – Project Rebirth – to make super soldiers to help win the war.’ He conveniently and very intentionally skipped over the detail that the serum hadn’t been human tested before he’d volunteered. ‘Him and Howard Stark injected me with it and put me into this pod machine that they flooded with vita rays and this is what happened.’ 

‘What else can you do?’

‘I’m stronger. And faster. We never properly tested what my limits were since Erskine was shot by a Hydra agent as soon as it was done.’ A scowl furrowed his brow as he wrung out the underclothes with more force than necessary. ‘They wanted to put me into a lab after he was killed instead of letting me come out here since they couldn’t recreate the serum again without the doctor.’ Steve picked up the sudsy bar of soap where it was perched precariously on a rock between them to wash his hands now that he’d finished the messy work after dropping the wrung out clothing item back into the bucket they’d soaked things in for the day to hang up back at camp. ‘I heal faster now and my senses are better. I’m not color blind anymore and I can see and hear and smell so much more.’ 

‘Can you hear a heartbeat?’ 

‘If it’s quiet enough and I really focus, yeah.’ 

Just from the way that Bucky’s shoulders hunch as he finishes with his own washing Steve can tell that he was holding something back. Some thought or fear. But instead of immediately hounding the sniper for an answer, he lets Bucky decide how to voice it. That was another thing that had quickly become obvious in the immediate aftermath of the rescue, enhanced senses or not, was how _haunted_ Bucky looked. He looked absolutely exhausted and like a man who suffered a lifetime of torment as opposed to months. 

‘I think – , ’ The words faltered as Bucky struggled to articulate his thoughts, ‘I think I might be closer to…whatever you are now then before we last saw each other.’ 

His words had dropped to an even lower pitch, barely above a whisper. 

‘I don’t remember everything they did to me in that lab but I know they did _something_ to me in there. I could hear them coming from further and further away and I could smell blood this morning before I even came in your tent.’ 

A full body shudder ran through the sniper as he broke off sharing anymore details. Sympathy seared in Steve’s throat for the other man and how scary, how inhumane, it was and would have been to know that he was changing and not know what was happening or what had been done. At least Steve had knowingly volunteered for Project Rebirth and knew to a certain extent what to expect. But Bucky hadn’t: the other man had been captured and tied down to a table like a lab animal with no control or consent as to what was done to him. He could hear Bucky’s pulse racing, smell the fresh fear-sweat coming off his pores, as his body responded to the psychological trauma that Zola had inflicted. 

‘One day I heard Zola talking to someone that Hydra knew about the serum, what they were doing, and they wanted to create an opposite of their own. An opposite for _you._ ’ He broke off again, swallowing hard while his shaking fingers clenched around the fabric they held. ‘And that wasn’t even the worst of it. They had this machine…this chair…that they put me in a few times not long before you found us and they were trying to erase Bucky, burn him out, burn _me_ out, when I hadn’t died yet and everyone else had they’d experimented on so far.’ 

The fact that the serum and his choice to volunteer for Rebirth had in some way been responsible for Bucky’s suffering made an unspeakable stab of guilt go through Steve. He’d been so blinded by his desire to enlist and get over to the front lines, find Bucky again, do his part for the war effort, that he had blinkered himself to the potential consequences of his actions until they were laid out before him now and in the memory of a barely lucid man mumbling his name and service number while Hydra’s bastardization of the serum burned him up from the inside out. 

‘Buck, I’m sorry.’ 

‘I know, but it’s done now and it can’t be undone.’ The sniper dropped the trousers back into the bucket as well after worrying as much water from the material as he could. His breath fogged in an even more prominent cloud then it already did when he scoffed. ‘And who knows if it even worked.’ 

‘They can’t have you.’ If there was absolute conviction in Bucky’s words that he wouldn’t leave the burning warehouse without Steve, than there was the very same conviction in Steve words as he stared Bucky straight in the eye as he spoke. ‘I don’t care what they did, I don’t care if it worked, they can’t have you. And if they try again or if they ever did, I’ll come for you again.’ It hadn’t truly hit until than how much he had missed Bucky not just as a friend, but as a partner, _his_ partner, the man he wanted to devote the rest of his life to like wolves and swans that mate for life, in the time that they had been separated and he was determined that it would never happen again. Bucky stared back, uncertain. Still jumpy and spooked from his time in the lab and retelling even the surface-most details of his captivity. And Steve _needed_ him to understand that he wouldn’t have done it, wouldn’t have half-killed himself in the vita-ray pod, if it wasn’t to get over here and find him again. ‘I mean it Buck, no one – not Hydra, not Zola, not Phillips, or anyone else – can tear us apart because you’re mine and I’m your’s and it’s you and me to the end of the line.’ 

Partly because it was the first real opportunity for a private moment since they’d been reunited and they were reluctant to head back to camp just yet, and Steve could hear exactly where all of the sentries were on watch, who were still alert and who was barely awake still, and partly because he couldn’t stand to see his partner look so fucking _haunted_ , he pulled the other man into a fierce hug, tightening his grip when he felt how Bucky was shaking. Whatever Zola had done to him, Bucky still smelt the same as Steve buried his face against the groove between his shoulder and neck as his hand buried itself into the short locks of hair at the nape of the other man’s neck and drew him in even closer. Re-establishing their connection. Reaffirming he was here now and Steve was strong enough and healthy enough to protect them both. 

It was like the physical contact broke whatever thin membrane of sheer will power Bucky had been using to hold back the horror and fear of his Austria memories and the tears he’d been holding back since his rescue finally came, and before he was could stop it, the shaking had turned to sobbing. He already knew that he wouldn’t be able to put the lid back on that Pandora’s box so he did what he hadn’t been able to do for the weeks and months in Zola’s lab – he surrendered. He let himself cry and shake and gasp for breath against Steve’s shoulder, knowing he was finally _safe_. That he wasn’t going to die strapped to that table or worse. 

Steve blinked away his own tears as he listened to other man cry. Smelt the salt of his tears. Felt them seeping through his shirt. Felt Bucky shaking apart in his arms. It physically hurt him to see and hear and feel the other man in pain. But he didn’t try to stop it. Bucky needed this; they needed this. Purging was always part of the healing. And now that Steve was here they could rebuild together. They had always been stronger together and now their two pieces had come back together. The pieces had changed shape from what they used to be but they were still the same pieces and they still fit together most importantly of all.

**Author's Note:**

> I chose to include the bit about the chair and the shock therapy after seeing a very interesting Instagram post where someone pointed out that Bucky had bruises/marks on his face that matched the pads from the machine seen in the Winter Soldier and thought that could be interesting to touch on and explore a bit. I've also wondered a few times in the past if Steve can hear a heart-beat after the serum and there seems to be opinions both ways - not sure what the comic book canon on that is or if it goes either way as well - but felt like including it for another interesting point to touch on. 
> 
> I'd recommend checking back as well as I tend to edit and add little extra bits after posting when I used to write and post fics in the past and will possibly do so also with this story if I think of other things to add or would enhance the story/imagery/descriptions or any typos I may have missed. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed and do let me know what you think!


End file.
